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Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Mistake
Scribbled
Write
Sheet
May
Erase
Firsts
Sheets
First
Blank
Must
Error
Writing
Errors
Ignorance

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.
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The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life but the same can be said of the most weak.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.
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None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Hope is a prodigal young heir, and Experience is his banker but his drafts are seldom honoured, since there is often a heavy balance against him, because he draws largely on a small capital, is not yet in possession, and if he were, would die.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In science, reason is the guide in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We must be careful how we flatter fools too little, or wise men too much, for the flatterer must act the very reverse of the physician, and administer the strongest dose only to the weakest patient.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Wit in women is a jewel, which, unlike all others, borrows lustre from its setting, rather than bestows it since nothing is so easy as to fancy a very beautiful woman extremely witty.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The present time has one advantage over every other -- it is our own.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one, until it be in your power to remunerate all otherwise you will make more enemies by what you give, than by what you withhold.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.
Charles Caleb Colton
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As we ascend in society, like those who climb a mountain, we shall find that the line of perpetual congelation commences with the higher circles and the nearer we approach to the grand luminary the court, the more frigidity and apathy shall we experience.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton
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As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.
Charles Caleb Colton